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Cuprous oxide

A project log for Bipolar dudes

A group for those who want to build their own bipolar transistors

yann-guidon-ygdesYann Guidon / YGDES 02/23/2018 at 12:262 Comments

From someone who discussed with the author of "Instruments of Amplification":

"Friedrichs also had tinkered with cuprous oxide transistors.

What he didn't tell in the book: only one of 10 cuprous oxide transistors had worked as intended,
and they tend to die at 5V+ or so. He wasn't aware of this when testing them with a curve tracer."

OK that also explains why they are not in common use :-D

But still, 5V is not a crazy working voltage and many circuits use 3.3V.

Discussions

Marcel van Kervinck wrote 03/01/2018 at 16:40 point

My copy of the IoA just arrived. Might be the seed for a nice next project.

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Morning.Star wrote 02/25/2018 at 14:42 point

I've had a play with copper oxide and made quite a few devices based on the research. Temperature sensors, photodetectors, pressure sensors... Its extremely hard to separate out the red CuO from the black CuO2 that forms on top of it, however I managed to get enough for those things just with a blowtorch...

I never figured out a way to make a transistor with it, everything I made was linear.

Any idea how the junctions were formed? I understand modern FET style devices may be possible with CuO... ;-)

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